Snapshots of Ghana

Students learn about computer skills in a classroom at Christ is the Answer Preparatory School in Adansi-Dompoase, outside Kumasi. According to school proprietor Anthony Kwasi Nyarku, private schools such as his are superior to Ghanaian public schools because the government-run schools are often under-supervised and a strong union protects the sometimes negligent teachers.

Photograph by Sara Joe Wolansky

Photograph by Sara Joe Wolansky

Anthony Kwasi Nyarku, a retired schoolteacher, founded Christ is the Answer Preparatory School in 1997. After retiring to his home village, Adansi-Dompoase, his wife encouraged him to found a school, but he resisted until he had a dream in which his brother showed him the plot of land on which Christ is the Answer would eventually be built. Anthony took this as a sign and began. His school began with four students and now serves about 180.

Photograph by Sara Joe Wolansky

Boatong William's Class 2-level students at Christ is the Answer Preparatory School are encouraged to speak English inside and outside the classroom.

Photograph by Sara Joe Wolansky

A torn alphabet poster hangs in the nursery of Desmercy School, where the students come from relatively low-income families. Though the school has benefited thanks to microfinance loans from Opportunity International, parents such as Richard Dedzoe, a mason, and Florence Oppong, a trader in foodstuffs, hope Opportunity International will further assist the school in improving its computer training and plumbing.

Photograph by Sara Joe Wolansky

Children enjoy their naptime inside the kindergarten 1 and 2 classroom of Salomey Kortsu at Desmercy School.

Photograph by Sara Joe Wolansky

Bright Ofori is a Class 5 student at Desmercy School and the son of its founder, Mercy Senyegah. He has dreams of becoming a famous politician someday: "I want to be president to maintain peace and order in the country."

Photograph by Sara Joe Wolansky

Photograph by Sara Joe Wolansky

A child in teacher Anane Vera's Basic Secondary 3-level classroom at Romesco International School learns about plants in the day's lesson.

Photograph by Sara Joe Wolansky

Rebecca Appiah is a Form 1 student at Romesco International School.

Photograph by Sara Joe Wolansky

Samuel and Rita Quaye are the proprietors of Samrit Academy. (Its name is a combined version of their first names.) Mrs. Quaye owned plenty of land and wanted to use it for something beneficial to her community, and the couple decided to use their resources to cater to the growing demand for high-quality education for local children.

Photograph by Sara Joe Wolansky

Students at Samrit Academy are served their lunch of kenkey, a popular dish of fermented maize dumplings usually served with soup or stew, in the mid-afternoon. The school caterers receive training through Opportunity International to provide more nutritious and sanitary meals.

Photograph by Sara Joe Wolansky

Extras

This summer I worked as an intern for Students of the World,
a nonprofit media-production company dedicated to pairing teams of college
students with nonprofit organizations. My team—seven students from Harvard,
Boston University, and the University of Texas at Austin, each of us with a
specific role such as filmmaker, journalist, producer, or development
coordinator—was partnered with Opportunity International in Ghana—a
microfinance organization that operates in developing countries worldwide and
provides services such as micro loans, mobile banking, financial advice, and
training to farmers, school proprietors, and other small-business owners and
entrepreneurs.

One initiative that we spent a large amount of time
documenting was Opportunity International's Banking on Education program and
its partnership with the IDP Rising Schools Program. Ghana has a
free public-school system throughout the country, but the quality of education
provided is generally very low because of factors such as extremely large
classes and irregular teacher attendance. Private schools are thus an important
alternative, and make up 80 percent of the top-ranked schools in most
districts. But because such schools are so costly, many parents cannot afford
private education for their children, even though they view the government
schools as a waste of time and resources. Furthermore, even many private schools
are often in need of more funding and better infrastructure, as well as a
sufficient supply of classrooms, books, school vehicles, furniture, and toilet
facilities.

To aid these struggling private schools and the projected
1.6 million children who attend them, Opportunity International's Banking on
Education program offers loans to private schools and training to school
proprietors. Proprietors use the loans to hire better teachers, improve the
infrastructure of their buildings, create more classrooms, and make other
improvements. Often Opportunity International also provides loans to assist
parents with the cost of tuition. Two of the schools where we filmed, Desmercy
School Complex and Samrit Academy, are part of this program; they are located in
Zenu New York, Ghana, in a village about a two-hour drive from Accra. The two
other schools we visited, Christ Is the Answer Preparatory School and Romesco
International School, are both located in the village of Adansi Dompoase,
outside Kumasi, and are part of a similar initiative handled by the IDP Rising Schools Program (in collaboration with Opportunity International and
Sinapi Aba Trust).These groups have
provided loans to private schools.In
addition, school proprietors, teachers, and the caterers who provide food for
the students during lunch hour receive training for their respective jobs.

The most surprising aspect of these schools was their heavy
emphasis on computer training and on information- and communication-technology
(ICT) classes. Every school we visited had incorporated ICT training into its
curriculum, so students learned skills like typing and were introduced to the
anatomy of a computer—its structure and function. Though some schools, such as
Samrit Academy, had their own computer labs, others were hoping to acquire
computers through future microfinance loans. Many of the parents we met
commented on the fact that computer-training skills are not just useful but
essential. Emanuel Akoto, whose son attends Samrit Academy, said, “In my age,
you had to travel to see a computer…the whole world will improve through the
Internet.”

The juxtaposition of children learning about modems and hard drives
in classrooms that often lacked or had only recently acquired cement walls or
basic toilet facilities was striking but showed the efforts of private schools
to prepare Ghanaian children for their futures despite challenges and lack of
resources. The Ghanaian educational curriculum reflects the awareness that
computer skills are not just the domain of the wealthy, but are important for
social mobility for children of all economic classes.

Sara Joe Wolansky ’12 is photography
chair of the
Harvard Crimson and a resident of Pforzheimer House. A
senior sociology concentrator with a secondary field in film studies, she has
been taking photos for nine years and has been exhibited in several group and
solo exhibitions on campus. She spent the summer working as the photography intern
for the 2011 Boston Team of Students of the World, with funding from the Jaromir
Ledecky International Journalism Fellowship.